Revenge is one of the oldest engines of storytelling. From Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to the modern thriller, the desire to make someone pay for what they’ve done has driven more plots than almost any other human impulse. And it is easy to see why. Revenge is viscerally satisfying as a narrative concept, and deeply unsettling as a moral one.

What separates the best revenge narratives from the merely entertaining is the question of time. Immediate revenge — hot, furious, reactive — is one kind of story. Revenge that has been nursed across decades, planned with infinite care, delivered with cold precision — that is something else entirely.

The Long Game is unambiguously the second kind.

The Patient Killer

When DS Gibson first encounters the death of Billy Bowen in a terraced house in Pendlebury in February 1990, he has no idea what he is looking at. It appears to be a natural death. An elderly man, already unwell, found dead in his bed by his home help. The doctor has signed the certificate. The case is, officially, closed.

What Gibson slowly, painstakingly uncovers is that someone has been killing former miners from a single street in Pendlebury on the same date, year after year, for decades. The killer began long before many of their victims were old men. They have waited. They have watched. They have carried a grievance that most people would have let go — or drowned in drink, or buried under the weight of ordinary life — and they have turned it into something methodical, relentless and quietly terrifying.

What Decades of Waiting Does to a Person

One of the most interesting aspects of the revenge narrative in The Long Game is what it implies about the killer’s inner life. To nurse a grievance for that long, to plan with that level of patience, to carry the weight of it through decades of ordinary existence — what kind of person does that? What does it cost them? The novel circles these questions without answering them directly, which is precisely the right approach. The reader is left to imagine the interior of a mind that most of us would find incomprehensible, and to recognise, uncomfortably, that the original grievance makes a kind of sense.

Revenge as a Genre Theme

The Long Game sits in a distinguished tradition of crime and literary fiction built around the long aftermath of wrong. What distinguishes it is the specificity of its world — the mining communities of the North West, the particular bonds and betrayals of men who worked underground together — and the rigour of its plotting. The revenge here is not a device. It is the entire architecture of the novel.

For readers who find that the best crime fiction leaves them slightly shaken, this is that kind of book.

[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game and the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.